I bet that many battle pet collectors would consider catching all available wild pets, or stoning all pets to rare, or leveling an entire collection, to be the greatest challenges in the arena of pet battling. But I think there’s a hidden challenge that many people forget about, one that comes with no achievement or ranking points… that’s right, it’s finding names for all your pets! Pet naming is one of the most underutilized (and yet most customizable) features of the battle pet system, probably due to the sheer number of pets available. While it might be easy enough to name one roach or one moth, it’s much harder when you’re suddenly faced with a dozen more similar model pets!

HOW TO: NAMING RULES AND RESTRICTIONS

To name your pets, open your pet journal. Right click on the pet you want to name and select the Rename option. It’s that easy to get started!

Pets can be named and renamed an unlimited number of times, so feel free to try different names out. Multiple pets can also share the same name, which can be a useful tool for organizing your pets (I'll explain further on).

Pet names can be anywhere from two to sixteen letters long. You cannot use numbers or punctuation. You can use spaces and some special characters (the same ones available for player character names, such as accented vowels).

- Example: Pepé Le Pew would be a valid pet name.

Pet names will automatically get the first letter of each word in their name capitalized, and all other letters in their names as lower case.

- Example: Naming a pet BIG BEN or big ben will result in the name Big Ben. Naming a pet BigBen will result in Bigben.

Not all names are acceptable; there are some restrictions in place for a variety of reasons. If you choose a name that is invalid you will see a message that says “That name contains mature language” or “That name is reserved.”

- Example: You cannot use most personal titles (such as Mister, Queen, Duke) as pet names or as part of a pet name (so Queenie is also invalid).

While some restrictions may seem silly (Duke being a popular dog name) and you can use special characters to get around them, use good judgement when doing so. While it may be difficult to report another player for their choice of pet names, there’s no reason to court trouble by choosing names that are obviously inappropriate, such as slurs or expletives.

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FINDING AND CHOOSING NAMES

There’s many different sources you can pull pet names from. Here’s some of my favorite sources of inspirations for new names!

WOW TERMINOLOGY

World of Warcraft itself is a very obvious source of names. You can pull names from NPCs, locations, items, and spells. If you’re ever really stumped, it’s easy to name your pet after the NPC it most resembles. I’m pretty sure there’s a very large number of [pet]Magical Crawdad[/pet]s named Pinchy!

- Example: I named some of my Raiding with Leashes pets after items that drop from the same boss the pet dropped from. My [pet]Death Talon Whelpguard[/pet] is named Maladath, my [pet]Giant Bone Spider[/pet] is Grim Toll.

You can even name pets after other players (this suggestion is meant to be good natured, of course; don’t use it to insult others, or you may find yourself with a lot fewer WoW buddies than before).

POPULAR CULTURE

A very easy place to pull pet names from would be television and movies, books, and music. Not only are there loads of names to pick from, but it’s a fun way to pay tribute to your favorite series or bands.

Think about the things you like to do outside of WoW. Do you enjoy certain sports? Where are places you like to visit? What else interests you? All those can provide loads of highly personalized names for your army of pets – it doesn’t matter if it’s athletes on your favorite team, cities in your home state, or favorite beverages.

- Example: As I enjoy cooking, I’ve named a lot of pets after food and cooking terminology. My snails are mostly named after French culinary terms, like Quenelle and Chiffonade.

PUNS/HUMOR

Pet collecting should be fun, so if you think of names that would make great puns, by all means, use them! It doesn’t matter if other players don’t get it, as long as it puts a smile on your face.

- Example: My [pet]Albino Snake[/pet] is named Coverdale (as in David Coverdale, lead singer of Whitesnake... get it, it's a white snake)!

FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Even if you don’t speak multiple languages, you can still use foreign words as names (though I’d strongly suggest you find out the meaning of the word before using it). You can even use fantasy languages like the ones used in WoW.

If you’re really stuck on what to name a particular pet, a simple solution might be to take the first letter or two of the pet’s default name, and then use that in conjunction with a baby naming website to find a name you like.

If a single letter isn’t enough, consider what an entire word might inspire!

- Example: My [pet]Stone Armadillo[/pet] is named Feldspar, which is a type of mineral.

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USING THEMES: A METHOD FOR NAMING MULTIPLE PETS

An easy way to find names for a bunch of pets is to choose names under a common theme. Like those cockroaches that I mentioned in the beginning.... Picking a name for one may be quite a task already; picking a name for all of them is a lot harder. But if you treat them as one entity, you can greatly simplify your task.

Themes are useful for helping you name everything from pairs to dozens of pets in one fell swoop. Simply start with one pet and let its name inspire another's.

So consider the cockroaches; by using word association, I asked myself, what do they make me think of? They’re hardy and brown and supposedly can survive nuclear war. They show up in swarms and carry disease. All those things, both positive and negative, can be used to help me narrow down some possible names for my cockroach collection.

- Example: After considering the [ability]Apocalypse[/ability] ability and the nuclear war angle I named my [pet]Undercity Roach[/pet] Uranium. Uranium is an element on the periodic table, which then became my theme. My other roaches now have names like Argon, Neon, Plutonium. By naming one cockroach, I was able to name them all!

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OTHER USES FOR THE PET NAMING FEATURE

ORGANIZATION

Because pets can be renamed at your leisure and can even share the same names, you can use the pet name function as a tool to organize your collection, by using specific names to mark pets for trading, selling, and leveling. I find this to be a more versatile option than the Set Favorite feature, which is good for marking off pets for one thing, like leveling, but not so great for categorizing multiple things.

- Example: Pets that I intend to resell, I name Sell. When I am ready to list them at the auction house, I simply do a search for Sell in my pet journal, and that way I can easily check to make sure all my sellable pets get boxed up and ready to go. This system also prevents me from accidentally selling an identical pet with different breed when I’m intent on keeping one breed over another.
COMMUNICATION

Regardless of faction, other players can see your pets’ names exactly as you’ve typed it. So you can use your pet to communicate with the opposite faction in a limited manner. It’s not practical for drawn out conversation, but it is a fun way to say hi and to pass on simple messages to other players.

- Example: If I’m farming a low level quest mob for rep, I’ll name a pet Farming Rep. If another player comes and seems confused as to what I’m doing, I’ll /point at my pet, let them get their quest done, and then go back to farming once they’ve finished. It’s far simpler than using the emote system to try and get the same message across!

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Hope this guide proves helpful for those of you who’ve been wanting to customize your collections with pet names and weren’t sure how to go about it. Or for those of you who've already started tackling this task, maybe it'll provide fresh inspiration as you face a swarm of unnamed beetles. But even if you never get around to naming all your pets, have fun naming your favorites, then go and show them off to the world!

This is a great guide! As a hunter, I was worried about finding names for my pets until I realized I could change them any time.

I name mine after characters on my favorite shows a lot. But I really like the idea of using minerals and elements! I also have some book shelves by my computer so when I'm stumped I pull one off the shelf and thumb through it.

My favorite thing is to name gifted pets after whoever gave them to me. That way any time I use them I can remember the friend who crafted or farmed it.

The first few pets I got I took forever to name. So much research was done to name my Pint Sized Pink Pachyderm. She's now called "Tuffi" after an elephant who fell into a river off of a train in England and survived.

I have a couple of pets named after players who gave them to me, and I think that that's a fantastic way to thank them for the gift! A former guildmate of mine took it a step further and named pets after people on the raid team, and we all had a good laugh seeing what pets he associated with which player.

I agree that getting started on naming pets is the hardest part. After all, there's just so many! And I only named two or three at the start because it seemed like insanity to try and name them all. But once you get started it's actually not so bad... and then you start looking forward to it... and then you end up like me, with a full list of names for pets in beta....

Some day I'll go through and name them all. Right now leveling is helping me name them. I'm not likely to get a pet to 25 without naming her. Still have about 200 hundred unnamed pets, but it's a good thing to work on during long flight paths.

I've named a few. Helpful guide, thanks. I ran into some of the naming oddities you mentioned. For instance, I tried to rename a spider I got from duskwood "Black Widow". No dice.

Now I stick to humorous names (humorous to me.) or thowbacks to movies I love. For instance, I've named my [pet]lofty Libram[/pet] "Necronomicon" - Evil Dead Reference. My [pet]Gahz'rooki[/pet] is named "LarryCurlyMoe".

My [pet]Personal World Destroyer[/pet] is named "Gozer" only because Gozer The Gozarian wouldn't fit.

My most favorite pet name in the game, admittedly for childish reasons, is the squirrel named "[pet]Nuts[/pet]". Makes me giggle every time I level him up as in the chat window it says "Congrats! Your Nuts have gained 53XP!" or something like that. Makes me chuckle every time.

All of my clockwork bots are named after Real Steel bots. My [pet]Blue Clockwork Rocket bot[/pet] is "Atom", another is named "Metro", [pet]Warbot[/pet] is named "Zeus"...etc. (Sticking with the themed naming convention you mention above.)

This is one of my favorite aspects of pets in wow. The ability to personalize your pets. I've yet to name them all and have lately been more focused on leveling all of them but I'll get back to naming soon.

Thanks for reading my guide! I guess I really just love naming pets because it's the one way to really make your collection unique... and because I'm an organizational freak.

Unfortunately with the naming restrictions, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, so you just have to try different names and see what will and what won't stick. With Black Widow, for example, it's "Black" that's causing the problem, so you can try using special characters to get around it, i.e. "ßlack," though I know not everyone likes that option.

On rare occasion I'm tempted to let the original name stand (i.e. Nuts) but I always figure I can do better than that. I ended up naming my Nuts "Coco" (so summoned, it says Coco Nuts) so I guess that's just as childish.

Peanutty wrote:I’m pretty sure there’s a very large number of [pet]Magical Crawdad[/pet]s named Pinchy!

Guilty!

I also have the habit of faving/naming the pets I level (or plan on leveling). All of my 25s are named, although I'll admit many of those names aren't particularly original or interesting. "Sale" names, as I call them!

One I'm particularly fond of is my [pet]Slithershock Elver[/pet], which is named Bill Moray (a play on Bill Murray, but with Moray, because it's an eel and... okay, don't shoot me). Got other "pun" names around, although none nearly as fitting as that one.

As for themes or "family" names, my 3 Manafiends are named Positron, Neutron and Negatron; my penguin trio ([pet]Tundra Penguin[/pet], [pet]Mr. Chilly[/pet], and [pet]Pengu[/pet]) are named Kowalski, Skipper and Rico, like the Madagascar penguins from the movie. And while this is about movies, there's my [pet]Perky Pug[/pet], which is named Frank after the talking pug in Men In Black.

I still have a lot of "generic" pets to level, and I'm not sure what I'll name all those rats and snakes. Time will tell!

I always wanted to call one of my first pets, a green [pet]snake[/pet] (though it gets blue in Armory and at Garrison ), with something either epic or spooky. My first attempt had a word that means "Queen", but then I figured out that you shouldn't use titles!
Second attempt also contained a title, because it was "Miss Wykidajło" (Miss Watcher/Guardian/etc, with a slangy vibe), a reference to certain modern Polish poem, where it was a nickname for Death.
Now I have a translation of "Green Kirtle". This one comes from one of the most underestimated Narnia villains.

Some of my moths are named after Sanskrit or pseudo-Sanskrit terms, especially after chakras, to reflect their colour. One day I need to catch an orange [pet]Oasis Moth[/pet]!

Fragments from the Black Temple are named after Unforgivable Curses from Harry Potter with a slight workaround towards Anger. Finally, they're Cruciatus, Imperia and Vaddav.

[pet]Fel Flame[/pet] is a tricky one. I named her "Iskra", because this means "a spark", but apparently it happened to make a pun with Iskar, what wasn't intended at all.

Or a [pet]Blazing Firehawk[/pet] named Niedziela (Sunday), because I bought it on that day and because the Sun that it's supposed to reflect. You get it.
(Though I didn't like the fact that Cata stuff just surprisingly popped up in Draenor…)
Each day has its own celestial body, but I haven't predicted any succesors yet.

Some names are more spontaneous. Standard elemental models are given improvised names but with a shared feature that all begin from an A.

I liked how I could name my two Nether Faerie Dragons after odd and even syllables of original name: Ne-fae-dra and Ther-rie-gon. It worked out pretty well if you ask me

Actually that's after Lovecraft's works that themselves have a lot of references, including WoW ones.
But I wanted to say that on EU forums one has found a priest with Libram named "Holy for Dummies" what we liked a lot.

Vakeetah wrote:I still have a lot of "generic" pets to level, and I'm not sure what I'll name all those rats and snakes. Time will tell!

The easiest approach for the pet families where there's just a massive number of members is to pick the broadest theme you can think of. As Hallow's End has proven, Bliz seems to want to keep adding pets like rats and spiders forever and ever, so you never want to run out of names.

Of course even as I say that, I'm really stretching to find enough rat names. I was naming them after RL pet rodents I've had, but I haven't had enough rodents to cover this amount of names! I've resorted to using my pets' nicknames and names that I'd considered but rejected, now.

Paladance wrote:[pet]Fel Flame[/pet] is a tricky one. I named her "Iskra", because this means "a spark", but apparently it happened to make a pun with Iskar, what wasn't intended at all.

Excellent post! I generally use themes for groups of pets. Like the 4 Dragonhawks... I named after seasons. The 5th ([pet]Phoenix Hawk Hatchling[/pet]) I named Tempest... after Tempest Keep. I have named and renamed pets dozens of times due to a name fitting a new pet better. Or learning the sex of the pet is different than how it's named... [pet]Kun-Lai Runt[/pet] went from Sasquatch (from Jack Link's commercial fame) to Sassy for short.

Some have names when I get them and I try to keep their original names ([pet]Pengu[/pet]) or I use the name of the creature that dropped them ([pet]Tiny Shale Spider[/pet] became Jadefang). Some I have named after D&D characters and NPC's... others after obscure pop culture. Like my [pet]Fox Kit[/pet] named Mulder... or my [pet]Death Adder Hatchling[/pet] named Nagini... or my [pet]FireFly[/pet] named Serenity.

Ultimately, my collection of pets is like my FunkoPops... an incomplete mess of random hodgepodges that fills me with joy.

Kalium wrote:Excellent post! I generally use themes for groups of pets. Like the 4 Dragonhawks... I named after seasons.

I named falcosaurs after seasons, though at first I couldn't decide between summer and autumn. Adding adjectives helped a bit.

Quite intuitively, I also named some of pets after people who helped me to obtain them. The [pet]Deathwatch Hatchling[/pet], Etrele, is a syllabic after the @Neolarva's guild; I guess several people have named theirs after the guilds.

I named regular dragon whelps keeping in mind the official naming scheme, so I had to keep Tabaluga for an [pet]Emerald Proto-Whelp[/pet].

I love naming my pets. Have so far managed to come up with names for my entire collection, except for some of the ones who already have names like [pet]Bananas[/pet], [pet]Trashy[/pet], [pet]Venus[/pet] etc.

Many are random names, some are puns, others are references to various things in other games, books or RL.

I named the 4 Zandalari raptors after the ghosts from Pac-Man; Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde. Then they brought out the 4 falcosaurs so I continued in a similar vein and called them Rinky, Dinky, Binky and Eugene.

Other groups of pets got similar-sounding or related names; the 4 cloud serpents are Fizzy, Tizzy, Dizzy and Zizzy. The 4 dragonhawks are Swoop, Swerve, Strafe and Soar, and the [pet]Phoenix Hawk Hatchling[/pet] is Slipstream. The Pandaren elementals are Ignis, Aeris, Aqua and Terra.

Some pets got named after gods in various mythologies; I have owls called Athena and Minerva, Hypnos the [pet]Dream Whelpling[/pet] and Phobos the [pet]Nightmare Whelpling[/pet], Erebus the [pet]Deathwatch Hatchling[/pet], Jagannath the [pet]Leatherhide Runt[/pet], Serket the [pet]Leopard Scorpid[/pet] etc.

A few of my favourites; while not necessarily the cleverest or most apt names, these are just some that I find pleasing. Jellybean the [pet]Mei Li Sparkler[/pet], Treacle the [pet]Viscous Horror[/pet], Harlequin the [pet]Shadow Sporebat[/pet], Calypso the [pet]Jademist Dancer[/pet], Bumble the [pet]Imperial Moth[/pet], Knuckles the [pet]Kun-Lai Runt[/pet], Oreo the [pet]Bandicoon[/pet], Candlewick the [pet]Snobold Runt[/pet], Pecksniff the [pet]Silent Hedgehog[/pet], Oakley the [pet]Blossoming Ancient[/pet].

All in all, I've just found renaming my pets has added another dimension of fun to the collecting hobby, and has made me grow fonder of all my little companion buddies.